Forty years. No, I’m not talking about the maximum number of years a ghost can age your PC on a hit. (Half-orcs be warned! Those blows will cost you dearly.) I’m talking about the game. The one that started it all and that promised to be something completely different from anything we’d ever seen before.
This game lets all your fantasies come true. This is a world where monsters, dragons, good and evil high priests, fierce demons and even the gods themselves may enter your character’s life. Enjoy, for this game is what dreams are made of!1
It’s been forty years since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson gave us the first tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. Making its way through the wargaming crowd that Gygax and Arneson navigated, D&D quickly grew in popularity. What started as a few white books – if you could even call them that – gave way to the numerous hardbound manuals of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a series of boxed sets, miniatures, toys, video games, novels, comic books, and a Saturday morning cartoon. Heck, even Steven Spielberg gave D&D an oblique shout-out in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The first edition was followed by the second, the third, the fourth, and now we are about to embrace the fifth.
Just about everyone I know who’s played the game has a story about what got them into it. I owe it all to my uncle, who, one very snowy Christmas Eve, gave me the Red Box and, without exaggeration, changed my life forever. I’ve been playing D&D now for three decades, and I’ll stop only when they pry that D20 from my cold, dead hand.
During the 1980s, some people were prepared to do just that. A vocal minority during this time thought that playing Dungeons & Dragons would allow you to summon Satan, or gain supernatural powers, or summon Satan while gaining supernatural powers. Just check out Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons to get a sense of how that line of “reasoning” went. In retrospect, it’s hysterical. But we can’t ignore the fact that D&D almost suffered a critical hit due to malicious propaganda. And for decades after, the game remained stigmatized.
We’re (mostly) past that now, thank goodness, with D&D having reached a new level of cultural, dare I say, coolness. Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. We’re still a bunch of fantasy freaks and gaming geeks, to nod and wink at Ethan Gilsdorf’s wonderful book. But the game itself has donned new, shiny armor. With hit television shows like Community featuring it and theatrical productions like She Kills Monsters celebrating it, D&D has defied the odds and crawled out of the Tomb of Horrors triumphant. No small feat!
On the occasion of D&D’s fortieth birthday, then, and in light of its heightened cultural position, we have put together this book as a tribute to the rich depths of thinking that playing D&D lends itself to. And we’re talking D1-2: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth kind of depths. All the contributors to this volume love philosophy and love Dungeons & Dragons and have brought those passions together to bear considerable fruit, much better than the spell create food and water would accomplish.
One final note. I have intentionally kept this volume ecumenical in its attitude to the various editions of the game and its attitude to the various philosophical traditions examining those editions. In short: all are welcome. Just like the best of adventuring parties, we may squabble and pout and poke fun at each other, but at the end of the long day, we’re in it together. There’s a whole wide world filled with dungeons to explore and dragons to slay out there. So let’s get to it. We begin, as, of course, we must, in a tavern …